For years, operators have been forced to compete for new subscribers on price alone. However, there are now indications that network quality, especially among high-end customers, is again becoming an important differentiator between carriers. This provides an opportunity for operators to claw back some pricing power, and win new customers.
In particular, data utilization for mobile service providers is already growing at an amazing 60% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), and accordingly, there will be substantial performance demands on operators. Analysts and network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) alike believe mobile data networks will grow at 100% CAGR for the next five years. This represents a great opportunity for operators.
However, the profitability of these networks is being threatened by the cost of servicing customer demand. As data usage increases and more demands are placed on network resources, some operators find that service quality is becoming increasingly spotty, as networks become overloaded and capacity is crunched. The growing popularity of smart devices and bandwidth-intensive mobile applications and services (e.g., video, gaming, peer-to-peer video, downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing, secure proxies, virtual private networks and VoIP) will continue to exasperate this problem.
One of the most significant factors affecting service quality in this context is insufficient bandwidth to satisfy the requirements in a portion of the network, which encompasses the entire subscriber data path from the device to the IP core network, known as the Radio Access Network (RAN). This part of the network is very susceptible to rapid changes of demand based upon subscribers' behavior. In general, insufficient bandwidth in this portion of the network is referred to as RAN congestion.
To relieve congestion in the RAN, operators cannot pursue sustainable strategies of increasing bandwidth, i.e., network capacity, in the face of what appears to be insatiable demand for capacity by subscribers, and hence they have considered alternative practices.
EP 2197152, which is incorporated herein by reference, is concerned with policy management systems in a telecommunications network and in particular, with the determination of capability information of a gateway by a policy management system in order to effectively subscribe to an application event or make a policy decision for a service. The capability information of the gateway comprises application event detection capability, application control capability, and security defense capability. Thus, the policy management system of EP 2197152 makes policy and charging decisions based on capability information of the gateway.
US 2010/0142373, which is incorporated herein by reference, is also concerned with policy management systems in a telecommunications network. On receipt of a service request from a gateway, the policy management system accesses a first plurality of policy and charging control rules defining a criterion for detecting an encapsulated packet flow and an event trigger for reporting the detected flow. A packet flow optimization application utilizes the first plurality of policy and charging control rules to detect the encapsulated packet flow and the encapsulated packet flow is transmitted from the gateway to the policy management system. The policy management system determines and transmits to the gateway a second plurality of policy and charging control rules based on the detected flow. Thus, the policy management system of US 2010/0142373 makes policy and charging decisions based on a detected encapsulated packet flow in the network.
US 2010/0150003, which is incorporated herein by reference, provides a gateway arranged to determine Real-time Transfer Protocol, (RTP), quality metrics for a specific flow in a network, such as packet loss, packet jitter, and packet delay. The gateway is arranged to allow or deny a service request based on the determined quality metrics and an active set of policy and charging control rules. Thus, the gateway enforces policy and charging control rules based on RTP quality metrics.
WO 2010/060478, which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses a policy management system comprising a plurality of policy templates. On receipt of a service request from a gateway, the policy management system determines an appropriate policy template for the service and arranges for a suitable policy for the service based on the policy template, subscriber profile information and service description information.
Some operators have attempted to address RAN congestion with trigger-based policies. This approach involves modifying core components within the network so that they generate triggers, or alerts, when certain usage levels breach thresholds. However, this approach is usually costly to deploy, due to the requirement of modifying components so that they can perform this extra functionality in a very low-latency environment. An alternative approach taken by operators has been to deploy network probes or Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) platforms to detect RAN congestion. Typically this approach requires the deployment of new hardware to measure the network activity, in a process that is both costly and time consuming. Therefore, this approach does not scale well and so it is not suitable for wide-scale permanent deployment.
An object of the present invention is to provide a more effective method for determining policy decisions in a telecommunications network and in particular, to provide an effective method for optimizing network capacity.